


just a splinter

by untrustworthyglitch



Series: symbiosis [2]
Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Demonic Possession, Gen, Humor, some very light body horror?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 16:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12236397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/untrustworthyglitch/pseuds/untrustworthyglitch
Summary: Mark has three problems right now, including:a) the huge chunk of wood literally impaling him,b) the demon in the back of his head, who is being very uncooperative, andc) his panicking friends, who don't know about said uncooperative douchebag demon.Yep, it's one of those days.





	just a splinter

**Author's Note:**

> second work in a series, and while it'd made more sense if you read the first one first, you don't have to.
> 
> this is not what i wanted to be the next work in this series but i got the idea and it was too good to pass up. rest assured the next part, which i am already working on, will be more substantial and have a real plotline. either way here's this masterpiece in the meantime, featuring mark's inability to stay injured, dark's condescension, and kathryn's utter lack of amusement when it comes to dealing with the monochrome edgelord.
> 
> like it? have comments? wanna talk about outer space? head on down to untrustworthyglitch.tumblr.com where i promise to use a lot of exclamation points and the :D face

Mark’s not entirely sure what happens. Once second they’re laughing, joking, having a good time on the balcony of the building they’re renting to film in, just him and the people he cares about hanging out together as the sun sets over the Los Angeles skyline. There’s not a cloud in the sky and the breeze is gentle and warm. It’s idyllic to the point that even Dark, curled quietly in the back of Mark’s head, is calm.

Then Tyler says, “Hey, maybe we should head inside and make sure we plugged everything in to charge before we forget about it.”

“But the sunset,” Amy protests, sweeping an arm toward the orange haze that is the horizon.

“I’ll help,” Kathryn offers. She and Tyler turn to go inside, and things go very, very wrong.

There’s a resounding crack. The balcony shudders and more than one person screams. Tyler and Kathryn, already inside, grab frantically for the others as the balcony begins to separate from the house. Amy and Ethan make it in, but right as Ethan reaches to haul Mark inside, the balcony collapses entirely. Mark falls.

He hits the ground, four storeys down, with an impact akin to falling out of bed. It doesn’t register as pain, which is good, and he doesn’t think anything is broken, which is even better. Dark grumbles but makes no move to take over, so Mark assumes he’s fine.

Distantly Mark can hear his friends shouting and maybe he blacks out for a second, because when he opens his eyes Ethan is there, frantic.

“Mark, oh my god,” he says, gripping Mark’s shoulder with shaking hands. “Holy shit. Oh no. Mark, hang on, Tyler’s calling an ambulance, okay, just hold on, _fuck.”_

“I’m fine,” Mark croaks. Huh. He tastes blood. Fun.

“Jesus,” Ethan mutters. “Hold still, okay? It’s gonna be fine. It’s all gonna be fine.”

“I’m good,” Mark assures him, and makes to sit up. There’s a slight twinge of pain in his lower back, but that’s fine by him, considering he should technically be very injured or even dead, probably. He’ll take a little bit of back pain over death any day.

“Don’t move!” Ethan shouts, flailing his hands uselessly as though he’s not entirely sure what to do with them beyond that. 

“Ethan, chill,” Mark says, and tries to stand. His head goes fuzzy for a split second and the taste of blood in his mouth gets stronger, but eventually he ends up with his feet on solid ground. Ethan squeaks and flails some more, but Mark largely ignores him in favor of trying to run a hand over the stinging on his back. 

Oh. There’s a giant stick of lumber speared through his side. Well, shit.

“Mark, please sit down,” Amy pleads. There are tears in her eyes. 

“Fuck,” Mark says. Panic starts to set in. Why doesn’t it hurt? How is he standing right now? Why is he just now noticing that there’s a piece of balcony rammed straight through his side? Aren’t there organs there? Aren’t his actual internal organs being impaled by wood right now? What’s in that region? Kidneys? Is he gonna need a new kidney? Fuck, where’s he gonna get a new kidney? Those are kinda hard to come by, aren’t they? Is he gonna have to hunt down the black market? Is one of his friends going to have to donate a kidney to him? Which one? Tyler’s out, so it’ll have to be one of the others. Hey, Ethan, what size kidneys do you have?

_“Calm down,”_ Dark mutters, interrupting Mark’s spiraling. _“You’re fine. I’m here, remember?”_

“How could I forget?” Mark says, and only realizes he’d said it out loud when Amy gives him a weird look. That doesn’t matter right now. She’ll brush it off as injury-fueled panic. 

“Mark, please sit down,” Tyler says, firmly, as though Mark is under no circumstances allowed to argue with him. Mark looks around for somewhere to sit. There’s the ruins of the balcony, but those are splintered and wrecked, so that’s out. The porch of the building is too far to be worth hobbling toward. He settles for collapsing onto the curb, which jostles the huge-ass wood bit running Mark through. Mark winces. It doesn’t really hurt, but his brain says it should.

“Am I gonna heal?” he says out loud.

Tyler says, “The ambulance should be here soon.”

At the same time, Dark grumbles, _“Of course.”_

“Thank god,” Mark says. 

“I’ll go wait out front for the ambulance,” Amy offers. She grabs Kathryn’s hand and drags her towards the front of the house. There are tears in her eyes.

_“Take the wood out,”_ Dark tells him. Mark’s heart kicks into hyperdrive. No way in hell does he want to take the wood out. That’ll _hurt._

“I don’t want to,” he says, but now that he’s coming to terms with what’s happening, he’s beginning to realize that he needs to stop talking out loud. Tyler’s fixing him with a look that means he probably thinks Mark is heavily concussed, which he could very well be. 

_“You have to,”_ Dark tells him. 

Mark lets out a long, slow breath. Okay. He can do this. After all, if it doesn’t hurt now, how much worse is it really going to get? He’s relatively sure that Dark can keep the pain from actually registering. He’s also almost confident that Dark would be willing to do that.

_“What you feel, I feel,”_ Dark reminds him, which Mark takes to mean that of course he’s willing to do whatever demon black magic thing he does and keep Mark from registering the physical pain of being literally impaled and then being forcibly un-impaled. Great.

“Okay,” Mark says, steeling himself. He takes another deep breath. Cool. He can do this.

“Mark, just hold on, okay,” Ethan says. He sounds like he’s holding back tears. 

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Mark replies shakily. He runs a hand over the skin where the wood is poking through. It’s not a thick chunk of wood, at least. He thinks it might have been part of a banister at one point, but now it’s part of his body, and that situation needs to be neutralized immediately. 

“Don’t touch it, you’ll make it worse,” Tyler says, and Mark didn’t even realize until right then that he really needed to hear the sound of his steady, calm voice. 

“I’m not bleeding,” Mark says. He tries giving the wood a firm push with his index finger. It doesn’t hurt, which is nice, but it also doesn’t budge, which is less nice.

“The wood is keeping most of the blood in,” Tyler tells him.

_“That’s my doing, actually,”_ Dark says, miffed. Mark would roll his eyes at him if he were visibly present. Drama queen.

Mark takes a deep breath and shuts his eyes. He fits both hands over the end of the wood poking through his front. The way he figures, it’ll be easier to shove it out the way it went in rather than trying to pull it the rest of the way through. He takes another deep breath. Showtime.

Mark shoves with all of his strength, ignoring the alarm bells clanging in his mind and the actual sirens of the ambulance as it begins to draw within earshot. He friends scream at him but he doesn’t stop. With one hard push, the wood dislodges, and it only takes a bit of willpower and a determination to not vomit to get it the rest of the way out.

It clatters to the pavement bloody and splintered, but it’s out.

“Mark, no, what the fuck, why,” Ethan babbles, wide eyes fixed on the hole where the wood used to be. Mark takes a breath and coughs. He feels better already.

“I’m fine,” he says. He runs a hand over his side, smearing what little blood there is onto his ruined shirt. He can feel the hole knitting itself back together. Tiny splinters shove their way through the healing skin and fall to the sidewalk to land in the pile of rubble that used to be a beautiful balcony. 

“You’re _not,”_ Tyler says, placing steady hands on either of Mark’s shoulders. He stares into Mark’s eyes calmly, as though trying to get Mark to cooperate on pure dominance of will. It would work, too, if Mark was anyone else.

“No, I’m good,” he insists. He grabs for the hem of his shirt and lifts it to show the wound, which is still closing. The blood is gone, soaked back into the skin, and the former crater is now just a dip in the flesh, surrounded by a light patch of scar tissue that’s already beginning to fade. A piece of wood, the size of a sewing needle, pops through the skin and falls to the ground, the hole it had forced its way through closing up immediately. 

“What the _fuck,”_ Ethan squeaks. 

_“You’re welcome,”_ Dark hums. 

Mark puts his shirt back down and looks at his friends, both of whom are blinking and gaping. “So, uh, I have an explanation.”

He would tell them everything right then and there, but a horde of paramedics swarm onto the scene, and Mark gets caught up in a whirlwind of medical personnel and flimsy excuses. He insists that he’s fine, but they check him over thoroughly anyway, scrutinizing his every vital sign. They only start to leave him be when Tyler steps in and backs up Mark’s on-the-spot claim that he really is fine, that the blood spatter is from the thing they were filming, that the ripped shirt is just part of the costume. The paramedics shake their heads disapprovingly but eventually agree that Mark seems to be in one piece, and take their leave.

“How are you fine?” Amy asks. She hasn’t let go of Mark’s hand since she brought the paramedic crew storming over. Her mascara is smeared and her eyeliner is wrecked, but she’s beautiful. She’s always beautiful.

He owes her an explanation more than he owes the others. 

“So, uh,” he starts, and then he tells them the whole story. He tells them how, growing up, his reflection never seemed to stay put. He tells them how the reflection (“His name is Dark, by the way, he says hi.” _“I do not.”_ ) migrated into the back of his head, and how they’ve had several arguments on the subject of who gets to control Mark’s body and when. 

“I actually died, once, but Dark saved me then too,” Mark tells them. “I fell down a ravine--”

Tyler cuts in, shouting, “I knew you weren’t fine! Fuck!”

“I _was_ fine, though. I think I’m kinda immune to dying, actually. I mean, as long as Dark’s willing to keep us alive, which he could stop doing at any minute because he’s a shady bitch,” Mark says, just for the sake of annoying Dark. 

“Jesus,” Ethan murmurs. 

Mark tells them how no one else can seem to see Dark, even when he’s in the mirror. He doesn’t tell them about Jack, or Anti, or the way Dark sometimes vanishes for a few days and comes back grinning and covered in bruises. That’s not his to tell.

“So we can’t see him, but there’s a demon in you who is keeping you alive,” Tyler sums up. 

“Exactly,” Mark agrees. He tries for a smile, but it probably falls flat. The situation isn’t exactly funny.

_“They could see me, you know,”_ Dark informs him, condescending. _“That is, if I let them.”_

“Wait, what?” Mark says, out loud, because he’s still a little shaken up and it’s always been hard for him to easily carry on both internal and external conversations at once. 

_“Let me meet them. Get a mirror,”_ Dark says. 

“Holy shit, yeah,” Mark says, and scrambles to stand. He heads for the back door of the house, calling over his shoulder, “Come with me!”

“Why?” Ethan asks, but they follow him anyway. He takes the stairs two at a time, ignoring the dull ache that’s slowly fading from the newly healed skin. Dark grumbles something about being over-eager, but Mark ignores him. There’s something to be said for the thrill of an exposed secret, especially after it’s been kept for over two decades.

“Come in here,” he calls over his shoulder, making a beeline for the bathroom. He flips on the light and leans on the counter. Dark is immediately visible, suit perfectly pressed and hair artfully tousled. Mark levels a finger at him and mutters, “You better not be pranking me right now.”

“Why would I?” Dark asks, seemingly bored. 

“Mark, why are we in the bathroom?” Amy wonders. She leans a hip against the doorframe and regards her boyfriend with a raised eyebrow. Ethan peers over her shoulder.

“Because this is where I come to argue with my reflection,” Mark tells her, gesturing toward the mirror.

Amy gasps. She covers her mouth with a hand and takes a small, shaky step back.

“Hello,” Dark says. His voice fills the space of the bathroom easily with that weird reverberation and ringing that’s always present when he chooses to physically manifest. 

“What the fuck,” Tyler says.

“Jesus Christ,” Ethan breathes.

“Holy shit,” Kathryn murmurs.

“Everybody, meet the demon in my head,” Mark says, making sweeping gestures between the mirror and his friends, who are in varying states of blinking, open-mouthed shock. Dark levels a glare on him, but Mark doesn’t react. After all, Dark could have let him die earlier, but he didn’t. His threats aren’t really threats, per se.

“How nice it is to finally meet you all,” Dark says. He tilts his chin downward to better stare at them with his bright red eyes. He rolls his shoulders and stands up straighter. Posturing.

“You could have met them sooner, if you’d told me that was even possible,” Mark mutters accusingly.

“You never asked,” Dark says cooly. He turns his attention back to Mark’s friends, none of whom have made any move to get closer. “Come on in, then. I can’t reach through the mirror and get you, after all.”

“How do we know?” Kathryn asks, which is actually very wise, because technically nothing is stopping Dark from leaping back into Mark’s body and killing them all except for Mark’s pure stubbornness and force of will. That, and Dark’s seeming disinterest in killing them, but hey, it could happen. Demons are tricky. Supposedly.

Come to think of it, Mark isn’t actually sure that Dark’s even a demon.

“I supposed you don’t,” Dark muses. A small smile tugs around the corners of his lips, and once upon a time that would have sent chills down Mark’s spine. Instead he rolls his eyes and grabs Ethan by the arm, yanking him in front of the mirror.

Ethan squeaks and freezes the instant the full weight of Dark’s gaze is on him.

“Ethan, this is Dark. Say hi,” Mark instructs. Ethan sputters something that might be a greeting, and Dark sighs.

“Charmed,” he says slowly, though he is clearly nothing of the sort. 

Mark gently shoves Ethan back into the hallway and grabs Tyler. He resists more, but somehow Mark manages to steer him into the bathroom, where he puts a firm hand on Tyler’s back and tries to assert enough dominance to keep him in front of the mirror to do at least a facsimile of an introduction.

“Tyler, meet Dark,” he says. Tyler waves a hand, but doesn’t speak, preferring instead to blink several times and breathe shallowly. Dark returns the favor with a confident smirk, and Mark decides that that’s good enough, and exchanges Tyler for Amy.

Amy stares at Dark with something like curiosity in her eyes. She tilts her head slightly and turns to Mark. “He’s been in your head this entire time?”

“Yep,” Mark replies.

“Huh,” Amy says, frowning slightly. “I’ve technically made out with a demon.”

Mark sputters but Dark laughs, booming and loud. 

“I like her,” he says, pointing. Amy smirks at him and bows slightly, which gets another laugh. Mark stares. He’s never seen Dark laugh before, not without a threat behind it. 

Kathryn steps into the bathroom of her own accord, raises one eyebrow appraisingly, and says, “Your tie is crooked.”

Mark laughs. Dark does not. Instead he looks at Kathryn with something akin to respect for a moment before turning to Mark and saying, “This one. She’s a threat.”

Mark isn’t entirely sure what that means, but Kathryn seems okay with it, so that’s that. After all, he has four great friends and a semi-decent (sometimes, partially, maybe) otherworldly being living in his head, and now that they’ve been introduced life can only get better.

Right?


End file.
